


I Don't Know What I Believe But I Know What My Eyes Told Me

by GreyBauer



Category: Original Work
Genre: Christianity, Dysfunctional Family, Exorcisms, Family Dynamics, Horror, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Runes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-28 23:00:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3873013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyBauer/pseuds/GreyBauer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a braided rope of rosemary and marigolds, both dried to brownness, above the door. It’s a charm -- she read about it in one of the articles on Germanic superstitions she used in her paper. They called it witchcraft. She thought she attended a university, not Hogwarts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Don't Know What I Believe But I Know What My Eyes Told Me

There’s this little book that’s not supposed to be there on the discount table in the bookstore. Paperbacks are piled on top of each other, not alphabetized by authors or title, and the silhouettes and long trench-coats on each of the glossy covers tell her more than the “50% Off Mysteries” sign above the stacks. The one nearest her elbow has the subtitle, “They’re just dying to meet.”

_Runic Alphabets of Germanic Peoples: A Practical Guide to Their Myths and Magicks_  is distinctly out of place amongst its neighbors. It catches her eye because the title takes up the entire front cover in a (charitably horrid) olive green, and features the scrolling leaves and flowers that adorn the corners of much older but equally obscure and useless books.

It sounds dull. She looks at it instead of the back cover of  _Murder Noir_ , or whatever book she’s holding.

It’s hard-cover, and the binding is almost thicker than the stack of pages. It was copyrighted more than fifteen years prior. The back promises to unveil the secrets of the Elder Futhark, the oldest pagan alphabet, and supposedly its secrets threaten to destabilize the Church. She doesn’t think something that thin could destabilize anything, and she sets it down to head over to the science-fiction section, looking for something she’ll care about if she’s going to spend more than five dollars.

Two weeks later, her Classics professor assigns a term paper on dead languages (that are  _not_  Latin, he makes a point of saying) and their surrounding cultures, and she goes back for the book. It had been returned to its home in the New Age section at that point, and was shelved next to a grimoire and an otherwise-respectably-thick book of first-hand alien abduction accounts.

She rolls her eyes and pays the thirteen dollars for it. A good chunk of her family are German -- maybe she could get some interviews about runes from them, and if not it will eat at least three minutes of the upcoming awkward Thanksgiving conversation.

 

* * *

 

Germanic and German are not the same thing, she finds out, and no one she knows has heard of the Elder Futhark because it was used from the 2nd to 8th centuries and then lost when the Anglo-Saxons started running wild in Europe. Her cousin, Keena, who’s Mormon and really into genealogy and the family’s history, lets her know that she’s both Germanic and German, but can’t tell her anything about the runes. “They weren’t used in the Church because they’re not latinate,” she says, which is a nice way of saying that the Church didn’t condone heathens writing. “But they’re derived from the Greek alphabet it looks like. Some of the lines are similar anyway.” Keena thinks maybe Aunt Laura would know about them.

Cousin Keena and Aunt Laura are estranged. Pretty much everyone and Laura are estranged. Laura thought she could cure her ovarian cancer with herbal remedies and positive thinking, and her husband had to get a conservatorship to make her get treatment. Forgiveness remained elusive. Everyone was still pretty tense about the issue.

“I don’t think Aunt Laura’s talking to us,” she tells Keena. “Why would she know about them?”

“Wikipedia says they’re used in divination. She goes to a lot of psychics.”

 

* * *

 

She hands in her five page paper on dead languages and their surrounding culture to her professor along with the other 90 people in the class and doesn’t stay for lecture. Classics is a GE course, and she has two-hundred pages of reading between her two major courses and a lot of equations to study for Astronomy. Her love of documentaries has not prepared her for a collegiate science requirement.

She shoves the book into her bookshelf when she gets home and forgets about it. A week and a half later, she pulls it out again; her Classics professor wants to see her sources and talk about her research. She didn’t plagiarize anything, she knows she didn’t, and the book was printed by the Oxford Press so it’s not a shaky source. She spends the following three days in a mild panic nonetheless, intermittently reviewing the policies of Student Judicial Affairs and formulating one-sided arguments in the shower that she wins but feels progressively worse about. She forgets to do one of her Astronomy assignments, which keeps her from an A at the end of the quarter.

 

* * *

 

Her mother was raised agnostic and became very Christian. Her father was raised Christian and became very agnostic. Their marriage was mostly a battle ground -- fighting whom, they didn’t know, although her mother insisted it was the forces of wickedness. The forces of wickedness always seemed to be her father, when he was there.

As the single income in the household and a closely involved, struggling business owner that worked three states away, he was not there particularly often.

In the 18 years and four days that their daughter lived at home, she had never missed a Sunday. Her mother didn’t approve of sheltering children from the truth of the Lord, so she knew Revelation just as well as the Psalms by the time she was eleven. She knew what it meant when her mother asked their Pastor to perform an exorcism on her.

“Methodism doesn’t ascribe to that -- way of thinking,” the Pastor told her. “Why do you think your daughter needs, well -- rather, why do you think she’s, ah, under the weight of the Adversary.”

“Well, look at her,” her mother said, gesturing at her back-straight-ankles-crossed daughter. “She’s getting gangly and, well, she’s changing, and she gets these pains and fits, like something’s tormenting her. I know it’s, ah, it’s normal at this stage of her life, what with the, ah, the stage she’s at and the natural -- cycle of -- you’ll have to forgive me, Pastor, if I don’t say that word before a man of God.” Her mother purses her lips and looks down at the desk.

The Pastor turns his old green eyes on the girl the way he does on children being baptized, and takes a breath to ask her something.

“But it seems,” her mother says quickly, and the Pastor’s eyes fix on the older woman again, “Like there’s a wickedness slipping in during the -- her upheaval, let’s say. In all her… new spaces.”

The Pastor, who raised three daughters of his own, understood puberty and menstruation. He lets her mother know that what her daughter’s going through is healthy, and that he’s happy to pray for her mother and her, but that the best thing to do with growing children is trust their doctor and hang on for the ride.

Her mother is not pleased, and decides on the walk home that the Pastor must not be so righteous as he thinks. It’s no wonder her daughter’s going astray if that man’s been leading them for all eleven years of her life. She’ll talk to the deacon, and they’ll get the devil out.

The Deacon tells her the same thing as the Pastor. So does the Bishop. After that, her mother finds a translated copy of a Catholic rite (she feels the translation makes it less Catholic, and therefore much more respectable), and performs it herself.

It takes three hours, and there’s a lot of anointing and shouting on her mother’s part. Her mother asks her if she can feel the fires of hell licking at her, if she thinks her behavior’s going to help her escape damnation. She’s assured that her soul’s going to hell already but that her mother’s trying desperately to save her. “I want you to be with me in heaven’s radiance, baby, but you can’t be like you are. God won’t take you.”

She doesn’t speak in tongues or crawl across the ceiling. Nothing moves around the room, the crosses don’t turn upside down, and she doesn’t feel a weight lifted off her at the end of it. The scariest part is her mother’s wailing and screaming, the look on her face.

Eventually, her mother either tires out or feels she’s done her duty, and she hugs her daughter tearily and tells her that, since she’s pure now, her bleeding’s not a sin and she’s not a slut and she can be Jesus’s bride once the Rapture comes. Her mother believes it with her whole heart: she can tell from the look in her face and the clutch in her fingers. She’s sent upstairs to do her homework, like a normal Sunday afternoon, and not given lunch in case the indulgence causes a backslide into sin.

She doesn’t speak for three days afterward, but her mother doesn’t really notice. Neither does her father, when he comes home. No one ever discusses it again.

 

* * *

 

“You’re not in trouble,” her professor says when he sees her face. “I should have put that in the email.”

He should have. She doesn’t know if it would have cut her anxiety down, but on the tail end of a another, smaller panic attack outside his door, she doesn’t have the energy to care. She know the circles under her eyes are awful from the mirror she’d stared at while brushing her teeth that morning, and the eczema on her right hand is acting up like it always does when she’s under heavy stress. This is not the class she’s supposed to be worried about, and she has a wave of ten page papers due in the next few days.

He lets her in and seats her on the couch by his window, rather than the chair by his desk. It’s a nice blue, and it’s low and lumpy and cramped by overflowing shelves on each side. On the table are eight different books on the Elder Futhark, all of which are thicker than the one she found, some of which have runes instead of English on the covers, and one of which features a shirtless man smeared with mud and moss wearing two sets of antlers attached to a leather head strap. The spines all looked cracked and worn with use, and there’s a halo of post-it’s jutting from each one. She thinks she knows what he wants to discuss.

She’s not interested in doing a Classics thesis. Her lack of response to the cross-departmental call for Classics thesis candidates (on three different occasions) should have indicated that. She has a double major, a full-time courseload,  and a 25+ hour a week job to contend with, and no free time for this meeting, much less constructing tens of pages on dead Germanic languages.

There’s a braided rope of rosemary and marigolds, both dried to browness, above the door. It’s a charm -- she read about it in one of the articles on Germanic superstitions she used in her paper. They called it witchcraft. She thought she attended a university, not Hogwarts.

They talk for about ten minutes. Most of the words are generated by the professor. She demures and says that she’ll think about it, and he offers her a couple of books to take with her as preliminary research. The flora-streaked antler-man is one of them.

“Just to see if it’s interesting,” he says, “Or if you’re interested.”

She shoves them in her bag along with Germanic Runes once she’s out of eyesight and tries to forget about the whole mess again. She’s not late for work yet, but it’s close.

 

* * *

 

_Karly would be so excited for a writing buddy since its her first NaNoWriMo, but I’ll leave that in your court since I know you are very busy with school, etc. She’s thinking of doing something about fairies. She’s in that stage, and makes fairy circles and flower crowns outside in the backyard. Her sisters like them, although Fox still tries to eat them. Toddlers!!!_

_Also, was Aunt Laura helpful on the paper you were writing, and did that class turn out well for you? I know you’re busy and really appreciate the time you take to answer your old cousin’s messages. Remember that naps are good for grown-ups too!!_

She’s not really sure how to respond to the message. Keena is ten years older, seven children wiser, and one heavy dose of Mormon faith stronger than she is. She’s never spoken to Karly before, and she’s more than mildly terrified of offending either Keena or Karly herself by interacting poorly with Karly’s autism, or Karly’s faith, or Karly’s youth, or Karly’s writing. She likes Keena. From what little she remembers from the one family dinner they shared when Karly was four, she thought Karly was alright too.

NaNoWriMo is a commitment she has no time to make and she knows for a fact her username is not 12-year-old-Mormon-child friendly. But she wrote about fairies at 12 too, so maybe there’s some common ground. She says yes, and jokingly tells Keena not to let her kids into the center of the fairy rings, or the bad ones will snatch them up.

She doesn’t respond to the question about Aunt Laura. Aunt Laura had told her father that she wanted nothing to do with him over winter break. He’d cried, the kind of tears that seemed more like blood from a wound than water from an eye. She figured that if Aunt Laura wanted to be left alone that badly, she deserved whatever peace and solitude hurting loved ones bought her.

That night, she pulls out the book with the mud-streaked antler man on it. Her professor hadn’t asked for his copies back last quarter, and he’d since moved to UC Irvine for a tenured position. She feels like she wants to stab something, and the antlers looked sharp enough for it.

There’s a section about house charms for peace, and despite her expectations they all look pretty harmless.

 

* * *

 

She’s taking a run after dark one night that summer (which she knows is stupid, she really does, but there’s been a heatwave and at midnight it’s still 80 degrees) when she thinks she sees something. She doesn’t like talking about it. She knows it’s not rational.

Something big is following her, and it’s jumping from olive tree to olive tree in the grove she’s running down. At first, it’s a shape like a blob and she tries to smear it out of her eyes. It’s just sweat. Maybe a stress flash, although those are usually brighter than the surroundings, not darker. Could be a squirrel. She’s tired, she’s running, it’s been a long school year. She doesn’t know what she’s seeing. People see strange things all the time.

She keeps running and ignores it. She’s just tired. She’s just tired. Nothing is there.

When she’s out of the olive grove, her whole body starts thrumming, lower than the deepest bass from the best speakers. She’s freezing, she’s not sweating, her fingers are clenching so hard around her thumbs that the joint’s starting to ache. She checks both ways on the road she’s about to cross -- all the streetlights lit, no headlights, nice and safe. There’s nothing strange going on. She’ll sprint the tail end of the olive grove, loop back through the fallow field at a nice clip and jog over the main road, then be back at her apartment in a half mile.

It follows her again once she’s three trees into the grove. When she pushes her sprint up a level, it keeps pace.

She’s maybe 80 yards from the end of the grove when a wind blows. There hasn’t been a breeze all day, but this one’s knocking leaves and over-ripe olives onto the path. At the end of the grove, maybe 50 yards away from her, is the thing.

It’s tall. Spindly. Its legs bend backwards, with feet like a human and haunches like a gazelle. There’s a splay of antlers on its head, it’s eyes are glowing, and she can’t see a mouth.

It’s just staring at her, crouched slightly. It flexes one of its hands, and the fingers are too long, clawed at the end. It’s skin is the gray of white fabric at dusk, and stretched thin like the back of a person’s hand. She thinks she sees its legs tense.

She bolts, out between two of the olive trees and over the low fence surrounding the fallow field. She doesn’t know if she sees something following her over the road, and the half mile back to her house -- doesn’t know what she saw to this day. When she’s inside, she slams the door shut and locks it, then does the same on the door to her bedroom. Her hands are shaking when she traces Algiz, the major protection rune, on the door.

She doesn’t turn the light off that night and though she dozes, she jumps awake every time the air conditioner outside her window kicks on. In the morning she drinks enough coffee that she can blame any jumpiness or paranoia on caffeine.

Her mother said the devil would come back if she sinned, but when she’s walking for the bus after late classes in the next week she traces Algiz on her thigh. It’s a letter, not a spell, and the thing was there before she ever drew it.

It can’t possibly hurt.

 

* * *

 

Aunt Laura calls her. No one ever calls her unless someone’s died, and so she leaves the ringer on. It interrupts the Pastor’s Easter sermon.

She isn’t upset about having to duck out, since the volume toggle doesn’t quiet the ring. She’d been in the back row anyway, and no matter how she adjusted her hem or straightened her spine, she felt wrong in a sanctuary. She hadn’t bowed her head for prayer.

Her aunt Laura had tried calling her brother (Laura’s nephew) first, the 97 second message starts, but his phone number had changed since he’d started pitching in the majors. Then Laura’d considered calling her mother (never Laura’s sister-in-law, not that woman, even after 27 years of marriage to Laura’s brother, even when she was trying to make amends), but thought better of it.

There was no mention of Laura's brother.

But Laura’s psychic said that Ostara was a time of healing and new beginnings, apparently. And she knew that Ostara was two weeks ago -- she’d gone to the spring equinox festival in Eugene and it had been lovely, all the colors and the little danishes they made of wildflowers -- and that it was, perhaps, poor timing and maybe even poor taste, and that she knew none of them took her beliefs seriously, and that hurt her, it really did, that they couldn’t be happy that she had faith at all, with all the struggles she’d --

“But I’m getting off the point,” her aunt says, tinny but stronger than she’d sounded since the conservatorship, from what little anyone heard from her. “I thought that Easter might be close enough to the equinox to count as a renewal. And I know it’s an important time in your family’s faith. And I know you’ve been talking to Keena, and Karly sent me a copy of her NaNaMaMo story and said that you helped her with the ending. I just thought maybe --”

There are about five seconds of silence on the other end. She checks to see if the message has ended, but it’s still got about twelve seconds left.

“I just thought maybe it was a sign,” her aunt says. “I -- Well. Ah, Happy Easter. Goodbye.”

She takes the bus home and doesn’t call back that morning. Her mother sends her a bouquet of lilies -- which are grave flowers in almost any religion, but look nice on her table. She throws out the attached card because the gold cross embossed on the front is more than enough warning of its contents. She sets bread dough to rise so she’ll have something for breakfast during the next week, and then sits there watching it grow in the sun on her table by the lilies for almost an hour.

She doesn’t know what to do.

The light is orange and slanting almost horizontally when she calls her aunt back. It rings long enough that she thinks it’ll go to voicemail, but the ring keeps thrumming on, twelve, thirteen, fourteen times. She considers hanging up, but waits, staring at dust motes drifting through a ray of sunlight. Her dough is more than doubled, by now, and she should punch it down so it can finish its second rise. It takes two hands -- she’d have to put the phone down, hang up.

There’s no awkwardness to her aunt’s hello. Laura apologizes about the wait -- sometimes the house phone doesn’t forward calls to her studio phone correctly, she’s not sure why. The thing’s far too complicated for someone in her stage of life to figure out.

It’s alright, she tells her aunt. She follows with a hello, and wishes her a happy Ostara in return for the Easter greeting. They talk about school and Karly, and how Keena’s pregnant and hopes it’s another boy, and the new dremel tool Laura got for her micromosaics. It’s calm, and quiet, and open.

They don’t talk about psychics or seeing things in olive trees. But they do talk about the way everything’s turning bright green again in Oregon, and how different that is from the deserts they both grew up in.

 

* * *

 

Algiz is not the only protection rune, she finds out. So are Hagalaz, Othala, Thurisaz, and Raidho. She knows this from rereading the book. And reading the mud-streaked man book. And a lot of googling, though most of the websites look like they were self-built as coding practice and advertise psychic hotlines.

Runes are just drawings. Letters. Shapes. That’s the only concrete, agreed upon fact she can find across her sources. She draws shapes on her notebooks during class and in the fog on mirrors after showers. She puts a happy face on her burgers in ketchup. Drawing five symbols from a dead language on her bedroom door won’t hurt her. And if she draws them on her front door, or the sliding glass door out to the balcony, or the window in her room that creeps her out, it doesn’t have to mean anything. It’s about as meaningful as people weaving bacon hats for their pancakes on pinterest.

She reassures herself of this. And if she draws Mannaz during finals week, and Fehu when she starts looking for jobs, that only matters as much as she makes it matter.

The placebo effect is well documented. Anything else can’t hurt.

 


End file.
